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How did the living world - bodies, time, motion, and natural environment - frame the art of early medieval Britian and Ireland? In this study, Heather Pulliam investigates how the early medieval art produced in Britain and Ireland enabled Christian audiences to unite with and be 'dissolved' in an intangible divinity. Using phenomenological and eco-critical methodologies, she probes intersections between art objects, the living world, and the embodied eye. Pulliam analyses a range of objects that vary in scale, form, and function, including book shrines, brooches worn on the body, and reliquaries suspended in satchels. Today, such objects are discussed, displayed, and illustrated as static rather than mobile objects that human bodies wore and that accompanied them as they travelled through landscapes animated by changing weather, seasons, and time. Using the frame as a heuristic device, she questions how art historical studies approach medieval art and offers a new paradigm for understanding the role of sacred objects in popular devotion.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Firmament and frame: the ringed cross and the sun's circuit; 2. Hallowed ground and Hellmouths: bodies and the sod of death; 3. Weather, water, and rock: like rain upon fleece; 4. Books and shrines on the move: entangled and expansive boundaries; 5. Fleshy tablets of the heart: Evangelist portraits; 6. The porous body: living altars and the crucified Christ; Epilogue.
About the author
Heather Pulliam is Professor of Art History at the University of Edinburgh. She has published in The Art Bulletin, Gesta, and Studies in Iconography and is author of Word and Image in the Book of Kells (2005). Co-Editor of Irish and Scottish Art, c. 900-1900: Survivals and Revivals (2024), she served on the curatorial team of Celts: Art and Identity, an exhibition held at the British Museum.
